Divine Factory by yahe0822

DIVINE FACTORY

Yanling He

Experimental 6 Architectural Association 2020-2021 Tutor: Brendon Carlin & James Kwang-Ho Chung

Yanling He

Divine Factory

City Inside Out for a Burning Festival & 5 Million People’s Daily Use

Divine Factory focuses on Silicon Valley, which is the hub of technological innovations. To understand the power behind this powerful engine, it researches Google, Burning Man and California Missions about how they optimise their spaces for boosting productivity and creativity. Then it releases these instrumentalise architectural mechanisms out of their colonial or corporation power, and transfer them into a series of long-term city infrastructures to enable a 3-Day Burning Festival inside the city, where participants parade effigies from San Jose to San Francisco. Along the way, the city will be misused and turned into a series of houses where the burners can eat, rest, play and sleep there. At the same time, these long-term infrastructures turn the whole Bay Area and San Francisco city inside out, and open up the city itself, to everyday use for 5 million residents. The city becomes a laboratory for experimenting with all living possibilities on different scales.

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Yanling He

Divine Factory

Experimental 6 |

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Silicon Valley

The research started with Silicon Valley, which is the gravitational centre of technological innovations today. Their inventions become new infrastructure embedded into our social fabric and daily life. The power behind such rapid development generated from the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Under the influence of San Francisco counterculture movements, the Neo-liberalism’s free wheeling spirit keeps growing at Bay Area. New generations saw traditional middle-class society was dominated by materialism, they are eager to change and develop their own distinctive lifestyle and systems. They kept inventing, misusing and DIY new ways of living and working. Burning Man, an underground gathering for these free spirits were born under the influence. It radically allows people to conjure up entire worlds out of nothing. The potential power for creative production behind burning man was soon recognised by tech companies at Bay Area and borrowed into Google new campus design. At the same time, some methodologies behind the technology company can be also trace back to California Missions during colonial period at the same area. The project focuses on researching these three production sites Google, Burning Man and California Mission about how they optimise their spaces for encouraging productivity and creativity inside the campuses. Then it takes these architectural mechanisms out of the colonial and coporational power and transfer them into a series of long term city infrastructures to open up the city for more living possibilities and enable a three day burning festival.

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Experimental 6 |

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Googleplex Google’s new Mountain View campus Charleston East is set next to its original headquarter, Googleplex. A cross shape path goes through the centre of the plan with grid patterns underlying, the rigid grids feel invisible for people inside the site but allow them easily navigate on large scale. The working spaces are a set of platforms where different teams can arrange their desks, shared table, discussion spots on their own. Collaborations and communications are encouraged in these setting for ideas flow. 8

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Experimental 6 |

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Google Charleston East Offices also featured all kinds of amenities, cafes, gym, massage room and gardens. It sells an affect of contemporary workspaces trend — tearing down boundaries between work and play to boost creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. The campus is no longer a single functional work space, but a cosmos for living and working.

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Experimental 6 |

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Yanling He

Divine Factory

Burning Man Burning Man, originally an underground gathering for Bohemias which born under the influence of 1960s counterculture movement. It starts at San Francisco’s Baker Beach later on moved to Black Rock desert. It radically allows people to conjure up entire worlds out of nothing. Theme Camp Placement launched in Burning Man in 1995, that each group can configure it to deliver a strong team and community feeling. It organised groups who come together to provide services, entertainment and art. It’s also the home where camp members sleep, eat, and established their commons. Burners engage in making art and inventing new ways of living, individuals begin to see and feel the manufacturing potential of collective, commons-based labour. Experimental 6 |

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Behind the Intangible Empire How Ideology Drives Productivity

Tutor: Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Behind the Vail… There is no doubt that Silicon Valley is a global gravitational centre of technological innovations. Under about half-century’s development, their inventions have become our society’s new infrastructure — the utilities embedded into our social fabric and daily life. Silicon Valley becomes the home for more than a quarter of a million technology intellectual workers today. Behind such an intangible empire, what mechanism made Silicon Valley a major driving force for innovation and production?

As economist Alfred Marshall first addressed in the cluster theory of geography and location, industry agglomeration reduces three types of transport costs — the costs of moving goods, people and ideas.1 Unlike traditional factories, in Silicon Valley, goods, people and ideas are orientated and driven by information content. With a glimpse of history, we can see these types of goods, people and ideas were emerged because of Bohemian culture, or so-called hippie culture. The first chapter of this article discusses the birth and expansion of hippie movements and their ideology and how it becomes the breeding ground for innovations. Their ideology later becomes a crucial cultural infrastructure and power engine that drove the development and organisation in these west-coast technology companies. In the second chapter, the article compares the most recent Google headquarter campus — Charleston East — with the grandest Bohemian event Burning Man, to analyse their similarities and explain why such an organisation and managing system works for both Bohemian artists and intellectual workers. The last chapter talks about how Google departs from Burning Man and turns its campus into a system where the intellectual workers can work, play, live and conducts all social activities there. We then argue that the nature of work may not change even under the hood of this most advanced modern form of workplace compared to the factory workers in the classic critique of capitalism.

Rooted in a Utopia Dream With years of living in Silicon Valley, the phenomenon of “liberal engineers with the freedom to frivolously spend money on avocado toast and nitro-blended iced coffee”2 will never be strange to me. With their six-digits income, they never look for an exquisite lifestyle, as an alternative, pouring their wages into healthy food, comfy clothes, new technology inventions and mingle events. This phenomenon can be well explained with their Ideology which promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.3

Everything started with a utopia dream. In a 1965 article by Michael Fallon (San Francisco Examiner, September 5, 2000), the word “hippie” was mentioned for the first time in this context: “Haight - Ashbury is the City’s new bohemian quarter for serious writers, painters and musicians, civil rights workers, crusaders for all kinds of causes, homosexuals, lesbians, marijuana users, young working couples of artistic bent and the outer fringe of the bohemian fringe — the ‘hippies,’ the ‘heads,’ the beatniks.” Hippies viewed traditional middle-class society dominated by materialism and repression, so they were willing to develop their own distinctive lifestyle. They favoured casual dress and communal or cooperative living arrangements, and often adopted vegetarian diets based on unprocessed foods and practised holistic medicine.4 Thousands of young Americans and even Europeans headed to their pilgrimage destination — San Francisco over 1960s and 70s for seeking an alternative life.5 The radical hippies were liberals in the social sense of the word. They championed universalist, rational and progressive ideals, such as democracy, tolerance, self-fulfilment and social justice.6 On the surface, the hippie movement may have appeared hedonistic, but at its core, it was about creating new ways of living. This included creating their own tools and living systems that were not reliant on capitalist systems.7 They explored open social networks and experimented collective actions in life and work under the spiritual and ethical guidance from ancient or non-Western examples. There are a series of radical experiments that challenged societal norms while proposing new kinds of technological, ecological and political utopia to fulfil hippie’s democratic intentions.8

“Let’s... let’s burn a man.” One of such typical social system they invented is Burning Man. The first burning man started in 1986 built by Larry Harvey and Jerry James: “... it was supremely romantic. And so two years later, having thought of this morning and night for a couple of years I woke up and it was the solstice, and I thought “I’m tired of this.” So I called up a friend and I said “Let’s... let’s burn a man, Jerry.” They made this man out of scrap lumber in a basement in Noe Valley and hauled it down to the beach. The event attracted around twenty people on the beach with a spontaneous performance. Then it became an annual event on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. Until in 1990, they were notified by the Golden Gate Park Police due to potential fire hazard and afterwards moved to the Black Rock City, a desert in Nevada. The site plan of Burning Man starts as a cross sign with a human effigy in the middle, and people surrounded occupying around 100 yards. In 1995 the Theme Camp Placement launched in Burning Man, organised groups who come together to provide services, entertainment, art, and other creative interactive experiences for everyone at Burning Man.9 It is also the home where camp members sleep, eat, and established their commons while living in the desert. A group of two or more Theme Camps can be combined together to form villages. The residents of these villages created temporary project teams for the building of art. They had used the desert plane to make themselves and their artworks extraordinarily visible to one another.10 1997 was the first time Black Rock City was clearly defined geographically, with a map showing camp placement. Black Rock City was laid out like a real city, with planned streets, and a semblance of civic structure. The shape of the city map looked more like a giant ‘V’, instead of the current circular ‘C’ shape.11 The site plan changed back to “C” shape in 1998 and became more like what it looks today, with four village circles, streets are numbered and include street signs on each corner. The shape has been found to be highly similar to an ancient native America site poverty point in Louisiana 3000 years ago, where archaeologists found the remains of a substantial wooden structure that had been built several times over and had served as the location for important and elaborate rituals.12 Most of the structures and urban planning of Burning Man has been added in an invisible way for people who participate in the festival: the streets that are surveyed to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that steer people together without crowding them, the 430 fire extinguishers around town, each tracked by its own QR code.13 It allows people to explore whatever they want to explore under certain safety guidelines. They “invented a sense of superordinate civic order — so there would be rules, and structure, and streets, and orienting spaces, and situations where people would feel a common purpose together; where people could become real to one another,” said by Larry Harvey, one of the founders of Burning Man. He described the environment as a physical analogue of the Internet. It radically democratically allows people to conjure up entire worlds out of nothing. Just like the Internet is a populist medium which has a unique way of empowering every individual.

Peer Production Under the Canopy With the expansion of Burning Man, more Bay Area technologists began to join the event in force after heard on the nascent world wide web or from friends or colleagues. Very soon, Burning Man had become a highly visible ritual in Bay Area tech culture and was playing host to computer industry luminaries.14 In 1998 Sergey Brin and Larry Page — two founders of Google went to the event and made their first Google doodle for Burning Man after attending. In the following autumn, Google starts operating as a company. After then, the elements and symbols of Burning Man keep showing in Google’s main campus and becomes its cultural infrastructure. In the lobby of Building 43 at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, two dozen unframed photographs of Burning Man were posted on their plain white walls. On the floor above, another 30 images taken from Burning Man line the hallways and overlook an in-house cafe and pool table.15

1 Glenn Ellison, Edward L. Glaeser, and William R. Kerr. “What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns,” American Economic Review 100 (2010) https://economics.mit.edu (accessed December 2, 2020). 2 Jennifer Gao. “Bay area stereotypes promote inaccurate generalizations,” (March 2019) https://gunnoracle.com (accessed December 2, 2020). 3 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. “The California Ideology,” Mute Vol 1, no. 3 (1995) https://www.metamute.org (accessed November 14, 2020). 4 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Amy McKenna. “Hippie,” https://www.britannica.com (accessed November 10, 2020). 5 Silke Wünsch. “How the Summer of Love came to San Francisco 50 years ago,” (August 2017) https://www.dw.com (accessed November 10, 2020). 6 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. “The California Ideology.” 7 John DeCleene. “The 1960s Hippie Movement and How It Gave Rise to Silicon Valley,” (May 2018) https://medium.com (accessed November 10, 2020). 8 Greg Castillo, Esther Choi and Alison Clarke. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2016). 9 Burning Man. “Camps and Placement,” https://burningman.org (accessed December 2, 2020). 10 Fred Turner. “Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production,” New Media Society Dol 10 (2009) http://nms.sagepub.com (accessed November 10, 2020). 11 Adrian Roberts. Burning Man Live: 13 Years of Piss Clear, Black Rock Citys Alternative Newspaper (San Francisco, CA: Re/Search Publications, 2009). 12 Alexei Vranich. “Ephemeral City, Eternal Memory” Compass of the Ephemeral: Aerial Photography of Black Rock City through the Lens of Will Roger (Las Vegas, NV: Smallworks Press 2019), 139. 13 Emily Badger. “A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man,” The New York Times (2019) https://www.nytimes.com (accessed December 1, 2020). 14 Fred Turner. “Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production.” 15 Fred Turner. “Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production.” Experimental 6 |

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Burning Man and google, both plans have a cross goes through the centre with grid patterns underlying, the rigid grids feel invisible for people inside the site but allow them easily navigate in large scale. 16

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Facilities are distributed evenly among the sites for easily navigating and time-saving proposes.

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Burning Man

Google Charleston East 18

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Burning Man’s links to Google have been particularly visible in the most recent built Google new Mountain View headquarter — Charleston East. It is an extension that is adjacent to the original Google’s two million square feet headquarter campus — Googleplex. The overall shape of Charleston East looks a giant tent seeing from its section. Why does Google want their headquarter to be under such canopy? Looking at two plans of both sites, it won’t be surprising that two are highly similar to each other with a cross that goes through the centre, together with grids forms underlying. The ostensibly irregular space segments are highly uniform. Similar to Burning Man, the structures and grids of Charleston East feel invisible for people inside the building. Moreover, the distributions of facilities, artworks, large rooms are similar too. There are seven sectors in Burning Man, with the service facilities distribute evenly along the central strips along the central strips located at the corner of the block. In Charleston East, there are four sectors on the first floor. The service rooms like restrooms, stairs, mini-kitchens and print rooms located in the centre of each sector for easily navigating and time-saving proposes. Among those rooms, there are gardens with similar sizes on the first floor. In completing the new headquarter design, Google selected the Burning Man Project’s Civic Arts team in response to the art installation work for Charleston East Plaza. With co-shared values of burners and Bay Area technologists, there was a strong technological bent to many of the artworks in Burning Man. Six Burning Man artists were selected with their scientific, futuristic and executive meaning embedded artworks named as “Magic Carpet”, “Möbius Strip”, “Curious”, “Halo”, “Go”, “Rockspinner” and “Quantum Meditation II”. This pavilion will perform as a complementary structure: one developed from the computational protocols and spirit of play that guide the work that happens on the premises.16 All the artworks along with the effigy at the Burning Man were materialised and dematerialised every year. For sure it is highly labour-intensive even at the beginning time. But such intensive workload never stops people from going there, on the contrast, there are more and more people visit Burning Man with the effigy growing bigger and bigger. The effigy expanded from 8 feet to 105 feet in 2017. In 2019 Burning Man attracts nearly 80,000 people into the desert which is 4,000 times larger in size compared to the original 20 people on the beach. Burners engage in making art, individuals begin to see and feel the manufacturing potential of collective, commons-based labour.17 As described by Larry Harvey, the Bohemians have a kind of erotic sense of property. They share with one another. They cooperate with one another. They collaborate with one another. They depend on their own communal efforts undertaken together. At Burning Man, the autonomy over the work that Bohemians look for comes true. One burner described “part of the fun is having a dream about something, building it, seeing it work.” he explained the team were people like him that very focused and open to anything with no egos. They worked very tightly as a team open to very intense focused energy in the whole team.18 Burning Man becomes a perfect Petri plate for generating most productive and creative phycological stage call “group flow”, which represents those moments when everything comes together to create a special state of absorption and enjoyment in what one is doing.19 Flow occurs when one is completely involved in the task at hand. It is a stage that highly desired by modern tech companies like Google. What modern management techniques are looking for is for “the worker’s soul to become part of the factory.” The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organisation and command.20 In Burning Man people spontaneously creating cool works and doing performances to make themselves visible to others, which is the major rewards for them at the events. To encourage these activities happening there is no assigned camping spot in the plan, but a set of themed villages that each group can configure it into their way to deliver a strong team and community feeling. This reconfigurable style also applies to each working section at Google Charleston East. It gives the flexibilities in designing and planning the layout and usage of their own working space. Different teams can arrange their desks, shared table, discussion spots on their own. Normally there are three or four people who work together with shared the same area. Collaborations and communications are encouraged in these setting for ideas flow. The ideas can be generated, exchanged and bounced between each other fast through the open plan. Same as Burning Man the large theme camps are located in the centre of the strips, if someone does something cool, others surrounded these villages will notice and gather together. With larger event rooms like labs, tech talk rooms sit at the central cross of Google Charleston East, Googlers can easily get chances to fresh their mind and boost their creativity.

A Kindergarten, a Zoo, a Territory… Although Google tries to simulate living and working environment under their giant tent as on the playa of Burning Man. A major difference between those two is the number of cafes. With most people cook their own food at Burning Man, there is only one central cafe in the middle among the theme camps at Burning Man, while at Google there are multiple Themed Cafe both located along the central cross stem and around the outer side of the building on the first floor. In addition to the free meals, snacks, laundry, dry clean, hair-cuts, shuttle services, gyms, swimming pools, game rooms, daycare centres, massage rooms, mental therapists and medical staffs are also available on site. Once they enter the campus,, Googlers can leave everything beyond work in the back of their mind, or even never need to leave the campus.

With professional staffs taking care of engineers’ everyday life on the campus where the bright pop colour residential type of furniture mismatched everywhere as interiors, Googleplex looks more like a kindergarten rather than a workspace. Google offices often come along with oversized furnishings, beanbag chairs, the aforementioned exercise balls, bicycles, e-scooters, or the occasional slide. It sells an affect of contemporary workspaces trend — tearing down boundaries between work and play. Many studies have shown the flexible workspaces and the opportunity to mix non-work activities into office life can boost creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. But it also lends itself to longer hours with less of a separation between work and life outside of the office. It is a top-to-bottom Gesamtkunstwerk, merging corporate mission and branding with employee lifestyle.21 With all the perks provided on the campus, Google is constantly named as one of the best companies to work with. It becomes a dream company for fresh graduates where a utopian future got constantly preached. They picture themselves working, playing or resting in these brightly coloured offices, while Google nannies cooking their meals and washing their clothes. But behind this glory façade, they are surely not expected to play as kids all day long inside this fairy kingdom. In return the amenities come with an expectation of long hour works with an entrepreneurial fervour to rapidly generate and iterate ideas. The ideal employee at most tech firms possesses a geek’s capacity for all-nighters fuelled by free food and supported by comforts built into the office plan that take on the role of nanny.22 As described by a formal Google software engineer:

Once I joined the team. It’s all about KPI (Key Performance Indicator), key metrics, graph sheet and performance review. Your income and promotion will be determined. Your colleagues all look like your friends, but they also decided your future. It is not a playground; it is not a kindergarten. It’s all result-oriented.

The campus itself is way more than an office or a workplace, but act like a territory controlled by the “peer pressure” jurisdiction under the notion of “changing the world” and “making the history”. Engineers are expected to work, play, live and conduct all their social encounters under this canopy, just like how their headquarter campus’ name “Googleplex” symboled — a number of one followed by a googol zeros where googol is the largest integer number — infinity. Endless work and contributions are needed to shape and build this contemporary empire within the invisible borders separating them with their impoverished neighbours.

The Vail Falls… Google establishes a common standard for contemporary workplaces where the notion of work and play got blurred. A collaborative self-driven working environment is created in parallel with the expansion of the Bohemian carnival — Burning Man. Over the last two decades, the fluid, casual style working environment inspired by hippie culture has migrated from tech and media firms to other industries like real-estate developers, banks and oil companies. Even in the watered-down versions of modern offices, these design elements signify a culture in which work and fun—along with their social and identity-forming dimensions—occur around the single valence of the office.23 As those technology companies in Silicon Valley becomes some of the most advanced and successful forms of corporations, the authorities that encroached on individual autonomy that hippies used to be against with didn’t fade away. In contrasts, it marks we are entering into the informational content commodified stage where workers contribute with their intelligence rather than manual labour, the whole system and working environment is more creativity optimised orientated. But more worrying is that even if the kindergarten style workplace falls out of fashion, the colonisation of workers’ time that it reflects will remain.24

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Kim Cook. “Six Exceptional Artists to Create Artworks for Charleston East Plaza,” (2019) https://journal.burningman.org/ (accessed December 1, 2020). Fred Turner. “Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production,” New Media Society Dol 10 (2009) http://nms.sagepub.com (accessed November 10, 2020). Fred Turner. “Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production.” Richard M. Ryan. The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127. Maurizio Lazzarato. “Immaterial Labor,” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics Theory Out Of Bounds (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 132. William Hanley. “Welcome to Corporate Kindergarten,” Architectural Record (2012) https://www.architecturalrecord.com (accessed December 3, 2020). William Hanley. “Welcome to Corporate Kindergarten.” William Hanley. “Welcome to Corporate Kindergarten.” William Hanley. “Welcome to Corporate Kindergarten.” Experimental 6 |

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Google Charleston East

In three research cases, Google, Californian Missions and Burning Man, people are doing all kinds of activities under the same roof. The new google campus is set under one roof with all the facilities, working zones, gardens, cafes, gyms and event rooms, its employees can work, eat, rest and doing all kinds of social activities under the canopy. It tears down boundaries between work and play to boost creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. The campus is no longer a single functional work space, but a cosmos for living and working.

California Misson

This methodology can be traced back to Californian missions during colonial period 200 years ago at the same area, where native Americans are brought into mission campuses to work and live. All kinds of stores, workshops are available inside compound and all under the same long roof, native Americans live, study and work under the roof.

Burning Man

At burning man a seventy meter wide central camp is set at the centre as a major gathering point. Participants can configure it into diverse ways of usage, like cinema, dancing stage, yoga place and dinning area.

Yanling He

Divine Factory

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Production At The Bay Comparison Between Tech Corporations and California Missions

Tutor: Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio

Yanling He

Divine Factory

History Repeats Itself… The San Francisco Bay Area, also called the Bay Area, enrings the San Francisco Bay in Northern California including San Francisco and surrounding nine counties. It was the first time discovered by the Spanish voyage in 1769. In the following seventy years, Catholic priests established twenty-one missions under the Franciscan order.1 The goal of the mission system was to convert the Californian Native Americans into a disciplined labour force and help the expansion of the Spanish Empire. The Bay Area starts transforming from remote open lands into a colonised agricultural area under the control of the mission system. Today, the Bay Area is well known as “Silicon Valley” for its high-tech cluster companies. With thousands of tech companies distributed along the bay, it is one of the most innovative and productive regions in the world. This essay looks at these two systems in parallel and compares the similarities and differences between them about how to start, convert and expand the new type of production using organisational and spatial mechanisms. Both Spanish missions and the tech industry are originated from a spiritual motivation. While Franciscan missionaries believed they were bringing civilisation and education to the Native Americans as a service for God by teaching them how to farm and ranch. The tech industry originally believed that technology will eventually free up all human beings from tedious manual work. But instead of achieving the original goals, both systems evolute into a new standard and model of administration under colonial and corporation power. A series of rules and routines of living and working were established for maintaining the structure and boosting productivity. Both missions and tech companies’ campuses were no longer serving for a single function, but a cosmos for living, working and all kinds of social activities. The essay compares the similarity and differences between the two systems in three parts: the rituals acting as power engine behind the two systems; the routines of living and working inside the campuses; the architectural features for assisting and enhancing the operation of two systems.

Emancipation or Capture The Bay Area looks quite different in the early days during the New World Discovery. With infrequent rains, most coastal plains and inland valleys were barren for vegetables and covered by shrubs and oak trees. About 1,000 to 2,000 small Indian villages spread over California separated by terrain and climate.2 Each village contains fifty to two hundred people with small settlements to avoid overuse of the undeveloped resources. They relied on hunting, fishing and collecting wild plant foods as food-resource. The bay remained undiscovered for more than two centuries from the first European navigators starting the exploration along the California coast in 1532.3 The entrance to the bay kept hiding behind the fog geographically. Until 1769 a land expedition from Spain first time sighted the bay and started the occupation. The Spanish used three instruments for their New World expansion: the fort, the city and the mission. All three methods were applied in California, but the mission is the most effective way.4 By January 1769, with the designated order form the Spanish Crown the Alta California project was underway. Between 1769 and 1823, Franciscan missionaries established twenty-one missions along the coast of California in the territory of different Indian groups.5 Indians were recruited or taken into mission proper for converting into the labour force as the backbone of the colonial economy in agriculture, ranching, and the production of leathers, textiles, and other goods. The friars believed they were bringing the civilisation and religion to the area as a service for God with good intentions, as addressed in their official rule of the order: “to observe the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, living in obedience without anything of our own and in chastity.”6 Based on the Gospel message “I come to serve…”, they outlined regulations for discipline, preaching, working and living. They used beliefs and religious practices as guidance in training the disciplined labours. But with the cultural bias, they ignored the civilised culture and social structure of local natives which had also been developed for thousands of years and caused uncountable disruption to the local culture. In reality, the mission system converted California Indians into a well-trained labour force and restructured their social, political, and economic organisation as preparation for further colonisation.7 Similar to missions, tech companies have a similar ritual aspect in guiding the production. Under the influence of San Francisco counterculture movements, Neo-liberalism’s freewheeling spirit kept growing in the Bay Area. New generations saw traditional middle-class society was dominated by materialism, they are eager to change it and develop their distinctive lifestyle and systems. They kept inventing new tools and devices. For instance, computers were only possible to be built with government funding inside private companies at that time, but those amateur techies also wanted to play and use them, so they collected eliminated components from nearby digital companies to assemble their cheap machines.8 Influenced by the media at that time, they believe with the development of telecommunications and the Internet, they would be able to build a new America where democracy will come true inside the virtual world. They could share the virtual world equally, created and trade with equal opportunity and express their opinions without censorship in this electric agora. But the dream of freeing up all human being from labouring wasn’t achieved. The hippies and their allies in the black civil rights movement were eventually crushed by a combination of state repression and cultural co-option. Although those who work in the tech industry still enjoy the cultural freedoms won by the hippies, most of them are no longer actively involved in the struggle to build ‘ecotopia’. Instead of rebelling against the whole system, these tech workers now accept that individual freedom can only be achieved by working within the constraints of technological progress and the ‘free market’.9 Instead, the DIY and sharing culture among the hobbyists created a perfect breeding ground for the birth of tech companies like Apple and Microsoft. The spiritual beliefs evolute into soft strategies in designing the offices to boost creativity and productivity.

Life Inside Campuses Workplace inside these tech companies are no longer rigid cubes, but open platforms allowing different teams to reconfigure based their own usage. Campuses feature all kinds of amenities, like cafes, game rooms, gyms, mini-kitchens, laundry service, massage rooms, daycare centres and gardens. On one hand, these amenities are the “free spirit” showcases o allure new blood into the industry. On the other hand, contemporary workspaces are tearing down boundaries between work and play for boosting creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. The campus is no longer a single functional workspace, but a cosmos for living and working. The typical routine of a tech worker normally starts with taking their company’s shuttle to the office, where they had free breakfast. After the meal, they attend the morning standup meeting to report daily progress and set up new goals for the day. Then they go back to their workplace and start the morning work, most employees are engineers doing coding work which can be done in front of a computer. Other service workers like security guards, janitors, chefs and shuttle drivers are contractors from other companies for the budget-saving purpose. Engineers from the same team always sit at nearby desks for better communication. Most tech companies provide whole day free meals and all kinds of snacks. After lunch, employees start their afternoon work. They normally have dinners and do some exercises inside gyms before taking the shuttle back home. Some work longer hours in the evening depending on their daily tasks. The daily routine in the missions is marked by the toll of a bell. The natives are required to present at all the scheduled routines, who have failed to perform this duty will be noted down and reprimanded later. It began with morning prayers followed by thirty minutes to an hour of instruction in the Catholic faith.10 As a form of prayer, the mission residents recited the rosary — count on a string of beads. At dawn, the on-duty Indian singer rang the bell for Prime. The duty shift was weekly based. When the bell rang, the natives who go to school assembled and swept the rooms thoroughly. At the same time, the singers chanted the Prime in the choir. Once the cleaning work was done, the singer rang the bell again and all the natives went to their assigned fields or workshops to work on or study their particular specialities. Most of the time man worked in fields, women worked in the kitchen or operated spinning wheels and children attended classes.11 Franciscans believed that idle time led to sin and wickedness, and that organisation and structure created the proper environment for a moral life. To make sure all the natives were pay attention to what they were doing or learning, the friars supervised and oversaw the whole progress. After the evening meal, everyone gathered into the church for more religious instruction before going to sleep. Those who were absent from the prayers would be noted down and be reprimanded later. After the friar said mass and administers did the sacraments, natives went back to their dormitories for sleeping. The dormitory was often located near the church because some of the religious services were held in the middle of the night. Natives normally slept is from 9:00 p.m. to midnight, followed by a religious service, then went back to sleep from 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. The dormitory was cell-like tiny rooms with only a straw mattress, a rough sheet, a blanket, a pillow, a table and a chair. It was used mostly for sleeping, as the rooms were dark during the day with only a narrow window. Some natives used them for four hour daily private prayers.12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Kurt Baer. Architecture of The California Missions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1958), 22. Spencer Crump. California’s Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays (Corona del Mar, CA: Trans-Anflo Books, 1975), 15. Kurt Baer. Architecture of The California Missions, 22. Spencer Crump. California’s Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays, 18. Robert H. Jackson and Edward D. Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System On California Indians (New Mexico, NM: University of New Mexico, 1997), 8. Encyclopaedia Britannica. “The Franciscan Rule,” https://www.britannica.com (accessed March 20, 2021). Robert H. Jackson and Edward D. Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System On California Indians, 9. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. “The California Ideology,” Mute Vol 1, no. 3 (1995) https://www.metamute.org (accessed November 14, 2020). Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. “The California Ideology.” Spencer Crump. California’s Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays, 34. Spencer Crump. California’s Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays, 34. Spencer Crump. California’s Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays, 36. Experimental 6 |

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California Mission

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The Campuses The Spanish Crown assigned lands to each mission for campus construction and agriculture and ranching development. The boundaries of each mission were not precisely defined, but the division between each mission was generally known. Most architectural or decorative styles of the missions are originated in old Spain, where the grand scale comes from the Romans, and the ornate decoration is inherited from the Moors.13 Each mission is varied in shape and design due to social and local material conditions. Forked poles and mud are the main construction materials in the earlier buildings. Later on, they are replaced by adobes for constructing walls. Most missions consisted of a square compound enclosed by four walls around an open square. The enclosure had only one principal entrance which is heavily guarded. Inside the compound, most missions had churches, offices, shops, workshops and storage rooms. The mission compound served as more than a chapel where the Indians could learn and worship. The plan had to take into account the three areas of activity: the religious, residential and work areas. Religion is the dominant social influence acting upon the missions. Thus the principal feature of the settlement was the church building. The church was placed where it would be accessible to all; usually, it was at the northeast corner of the quadrangle. The church is a permanent visual expression and transmission of Franciscan’ message. There are several necessary areas of activity must be provided in each church: the sanctuary, a separated area in which the altar is placed; a sacristy, accessible from the sanctuary, in which the priest prepares himself for the service; and a place for baptismal font.14 Not only the Roman Catholic religion influenced the construction of the chapel but also did the Indian himself influence the building of the compound. This counter-influence can be seen in the alley enclosures, the generally unbroken outside walls, the sometimes fortress-like appearance of the church itself. Often there was an outer arcade as well as several inner ones surrounded the inner patios. The pillars supported the arches in these arcades. The arcades helped to adjust the climate influence, kept the walkway dry from the rain and made rooms cool during summer.15 It also played a role to intercommunicate between different parts of the compound. All the workshops, offices and shops are connected by the corridors. Shops inside the compound were for carpentry, ironworking, and tailoring. Kitchens and bakeries prepared all the food needed every day. Workshops were for candles, soap, grease and ointments making, as well as dyeing and weaving wool and tanning leather. Preserved food and other materials were stored inside storage rooms called bodegas. The lands surrounding the mission were used for agriculture and ranching. Agriculture was the mainstay of the mission economies. The Franciscans controlled the crops produced at the missions and distributed grain in several ways. Some grain supplemented are set aside with some fresh vegetables and meat for the consumption of priest and Indian converts. Besides, grain had to be stored in granaries for the next year’s planting. Finally, the Franciscans supplied grain to the local military garrisons and settlers for their consumption and as seed.16 The second important economic activity at the missions was ranching. The Franciscans controlled large herds of cattle and horses and flocks of sheep, which provided meat and raw materials for artistry such as textiles, the production of large quantities of goods from leather-like shoes, and soap and candles made from tallow.17 The missions gradually attracted natives. Initially, they were attacked by the gifts offered or religion and life inside mission or followed by their relatives or friends. The Franciscans did not force conversion but used “evangelism” as the way to broadcast the “good life” inside missions to attracts natives. Bosch defines Christian evangelism as “the proclamation of salvation in Christ to those who do not believe in him, calling them to repentance and conversion, announcing the forgiveness of sin, and inviting them to become living members of Christ’s earthly community and to begin a life of service to others in the power of the Holy Spirit.”18 Once the decision of joining the mission was made, however, it is irrevocable. All the work and worship at the missions was required. Tech companies also use a similar strategy to rally the faithful and encourage people to join the community. “Evangelism” became popular in Silicon Valley during the internet boom in the late 1990s. A technology evangelist is a person who helps convey the company’s vision to the market and proclaims the good news about a given technology to the world. Apple Inc. helps popularise the term “evangelist” as their co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs constantly acts as a preacher during public presentations. In their recent build campus Apple Park, an underground theatre — Steve Jobs Theatre is designed for this moment. The role of the evangelist is not just marketing a product, but hope others could feel and experience it too. Once enter the Steve Jobs Theatre, a massive lobby is set up for experiencing new Apple products during the release conference.19 Like how the church acts as visual communication for Franciscan’s message, the theatre extends Apple experience from digital products to architecture and physical space and help explain the Apple Story. As advertised, Apple Park is a “perfect” ring-shaped building located at 1 Infinity Loop with an inner courtyard. The ring is segmented into eight sections by mini-atria. It has four floors above the ground and three floors underground with an inner rim and outer rim left open as walkways for each floor. The campus uses four-meter high glasses for its walls that facing the exterior of the building. All the furniture inside the buildings is made from a certain type of maple. The trees in the inner courtyard and the surrounding exterior are selected for matching the tone in design.20 It delivers a feeling of privilege for working inside the park. All offices, facilities and amenities are distributed under the giant roof.

Conclusion Tech companies and missions are apart from each other for more than two centuries, but they all use rituals as their power engine behind the production. Spanish missions used religion to help convert California Indians into the displaced labour force as the preparation for further regional colonisation. Missions are square compounds surrounding the central patio. The church is the primary building of each mission serving religious activities. All other rooms, like workshops, stores, kitchen, offices and storage rooms are arranged along the four sides of the quadrangle connected by the arcades under the long roofs. Dormitories were next to the missions. The lands surrounding the mission were used for agriculture and ranching. Natives who chose to live inside the missions must follow all the routines of working and worship. The zeal in technology starts from counter culture movements in the 1960s. Hippies dreamt that a new world where everyone is equal could be eventually achieved with the development of the virtual world. Although this “ecotopia” dream that frees up people from being labour with technology didn’t achieve, it results in a series of evolutions in designing working spaces to simulate autonomy, at the same time, boost creativity and productivity. Playful and leisure elements were placed into tech companies’ campuses like cafes, game rooms, gyms, massage rooms and gardens. Working areas are reconfigurable open platforms for encouraging communications between team members and boost creativity. Large event rooms normally set up in the centre for larger activities like product release conference or tech talks. The daily routine inside campuses are flexible but the performance will be measured within a certain period. Both missions and tech companies’ campuses optimise the spaces for production. The campuses are factories, institutions, and sometimes homes for those who work inside. This attracts the newcomers to join the community, in the mean time, is efficient for creative production. The boundaries of the buildings separate the inside and outside both in spatial and in the social status they established.

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Kurt Baer. Architecture of The California Missions, 10. Kurt Baer. Architecture of The California Missions, 51. Kurt Baer. Architecture of The California Missions, 43. Robert H. Jackson and Edward D. Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System On California Indians, 13. Robert H. Jackson and Edward D. Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System On California Indians, 14. David J. Bosch. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York, NY: Orbis, 2011), 12. Neil Cybart. “The Significance Behind Steve Jobs Theater,” (September 2017) https://aboveavalon.com (accessed March 2, 2021). Steven Levy. “Apple’s New Campus: An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership,” Wired (2020) https://www.wired.com (accessed March 18, 2021). Experimental 6 |

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3-Day Burning Festival

A 3-Day Burning Festival is enabled inside the city. During the festival, tech employees will parade effigies of themselves from San Jose to San Francisco along 50 mile El Camino Real, then burn them down at San Francisco ocean beach. The parade starts at San Jose SAP centre. Along the way, they use the city fabric as temporary houses. On the first night, they will rest at Palo Alto Park House, where more open spaces are available. One the second day, they will stay at San Francisco Street House, where they turn the market street into a longhouse. The effigies will be burned down at the end of the festival on San Francisco Ocean Beach.

Day 3 Burning House - Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Day 2 Street House - Market Street, San Francisco

Day 1 Park House - Lasuen Grove, Palo Alto 26

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Facebook MPK 20

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The effigies are tech employees from silicon valley wearing their factories. The figures behind costumes are the employees who tend to be underrepresented in the greater tech narrative. It aims to bring more attention to folks in the industry whose stories have never been heard, considered or celebrated.

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Apple Park

Tesla Giga Factory

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Day 1 Park House On the first day, participants move the effigies from San Jose to Palo Alto and stay at Park House where more open spaces like parking lots, groves, and stadiums are available. Park House borrows the Mark-on-Ground strategy from case studies to turn the open spaces into giant dining room and bedroom.

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The parking lots of the shopping centre will be converted into a cooking and dining area. Using the original pattern of the parking lots, we pick spots for setting up cooking facilities. They can be used as outdoor cooking for both normal time and festival. During the festival, temporary table and chairs will be set up along the parking lot with effigies set up in the central parking space. 32

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The grove next to the parking lot is turned into a giant bedroom. Mark the area with a central oriented pattern, then removed the trees which blocks the roads, evenly distributed water systems, which can be turned into shower stations during the festival. During the festival, interconnectable inflatable cushions are added to the site and form a giant bed for both people and effigies to sleep there.

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Similar to those two case studies -- Burning Man and Google, the central spaces of the parking lots allow participants to reconfigure into different uses, like performance stage, artwork construction sites, or garbage collection spots. Effigies placed in the centre of the parking spaces with dinning tables set around, cooking and cleaning stations are set on the further part of the parking lines, people prepare food, cook meals and wash dishes at those places.

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During the festival, interconnectable inflatable cushions are added to the site and form a giant bed for both people and effigies sleep there. The large beds also allow people to segment or configure it into different zones for multiple usages. People can climb on the effigy to sleep and play. The paths that pointed to the centre allow them easily navigate in the area. Shower facilities are set next to the bed.

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Day 2 Street House On the second day, participants parade from Palo Alto to San Francisco and use Market Street as their temporary house. Market Street begins at Ferry Building and runs through most of downtown San Francisco. In the research cases, Google, Burning Man and California mission, people are doing all kinds of activities under the same roof. The festival is also under a roof. A flat mirror roof is designed along Market Street starting nearby the Civic Centre that mainly covers the street sometime extends to nearby open spaces, and ends up approaching South Beach.

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Divine Factory

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Yanling He

Divine Factory

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Day 3 Burning House On the third day, participants move from Market Street to Ocean Beach. It is a 3.5-mile beach on the west coast of San Francisco adjacent to Golden Gate Park, bordering the Pacific Ocean. At Google Charleston East, in order to make the connection between different teams, the platforms are set up with different heights allowing the visual connection. Burning Man also uses high artworks as navigation marks in the desert. To modify the topology of the beach allowing the land have higher and lower areas allowing participants to view the burning event.

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Concrete steps are merges along the topolines of the beach. During the festival, they parade the effigies to this destination and set them in the centre. The beach becomes a large theatre allowing people viewing the burning event. The circles are added along the step lines using as activity platforms and facility stations along the border.

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Burning effigies are normally categorised into three ways, burning political effigy as a kind of protests, burning traditional effigy to welcome new year or season transition, burning funeral effigies to memorial the death. At the last night of the festival they burn down the effigies, burn down the factories that capturing them, burn down the old self for a radical self expression and welcome a new one. Audience watched the burning on the stairs while holding events at these semi-sphere platforms, or use the service facilities at the back part. 50

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Using the cooking facilities at parking lots, setting up the tables at those parking spaces, and enjoying an outdoor gathering with family and friends. The kitchen is optimised for collaborated cooking, where they share the cookware and ingredients, prepare food at the preparation part then move to the cooking zone.

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Divine Factory

Doing some outdoor activities at the grove next to the parking lot, watching their kids playing football and then taking a shower at either individual or group shower rooms, or even washing and ironing clothes there.

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Walking along the market street, taking a post-shopping rest at these stair blocks, lying there, reading the newspapers, charging the phone, having meals, or even bring out the school or office work. Under the mirror roof, the street becomes a shared living room.

Yanling He

Divine Factory

Coming to the ocean beach, these semisphere platforms are turned into playground and relaxation places for setting up chairs and beach towels.

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